Trouble at t'mill

His solution was to build an entirely new brewery, at the cost of £100,000 (around £11 million in today’s money) right next door to the one he’d been co-running for years. When it was finished, he moved every member of staff, every barrel of stock and every piece of equipment up the road, along with all his trade customers. As a final flourish, William also took the original brewery’s trading name: John Smith’s. It’s hard not to see that as a middle finger to the man who had caused all this mess.

Crucially, John’s will only covered the Old Brewery on New Street, so the new building and the thriving business it housed became the inheritance of Sarah’s children, Frank and Henry. Samuel the younger – Frank and Henry’s cousin – was left with the shell of a brewery and whatever sense of grievance he chose to fill it with.

A tale of two Smiths

Predictably, this schism set the two sides of the family on very different paths. The Riley-Smiths – Frank and Henry, who changed their surname at Uncle William’s request – ran the new John Smith’s brewery through a long and steady expansion; by 1890 it was already producing an estimated 120,000 barrels a year.

Samuel, meanwhile, relaunched the Old Brewery in 1887 with capital raised from his inheritance. His advertisements in the local press were models of barely suppressed fury, each one signed off with a small but pointed addition: “please note the Old Brewery.”

His descendant Humphrey runs it now. The Old Brewery is still coal-fired. The only remaining cask ale – a traditional bitter – still goes into wooden casks built by an in-house cooper. Local deliveries are still made by horse-drawn drays; one of the last working teams in the country.

The brewery was made into a private unlimited company in 1982, so it is under no obligation to release any data publicly. Best guesses are, then, that its estate consists of somewhere between 200 and 300 pubs. They operate under strict rules, including no swearing and no mobile phones. It has also earned a reputation for allegedly turfing out managing couples and closing pubs on short notice when those rules are held to be broken.

It’s a curious sort of success. Samuel Smith’s has survived in no small part on the strength of its US export market. Whether the brewery is commercially viable probably doesn’t matter enormously, given the family’s wider land and property interests. Make of that what you will.

John Smith’s had a rather different century. In 1970, Courage – by then a major regional – agreed a merger that brought John Smith’s two breweries and 2600 tied pubs into its portfolio. Courage was itself swallowed by Scottish & Newcastle in 1995. John Smith’s Extra Smooth, backed by serious marketing spend, overtook Tetley’s as the UK’s biggest selling ale almost immediately and has essentially held that position since. In 2008, Scottish & Newcastle was in turn acquired by Heineken.

John Smith’s is now one of Heineken UK’s biggest brands, shifting 165 million pints a year. It is still brewed in Tadcaster, on Centre Lane, where William built his brewery in 1883.

Both sides of the Smith family, in their way, got exactly what they wanted.